A while back, I wrote about the Window Farms project, an urban DIY gardening initiative that I find most inspiring. The other day, the below email crossed my desk. Britta Riley, one of the project’s co-founders, is trying to turn Window Farms into a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. She is trying to raise $25k in funding, via a Kickstarter campaign, to come up with the funding that will allow her to keep the project strong until late 2010.
Have a read about the farms, and consider donating if you like. I think that the Window Farms project’s way of leveraging the communicative power of the internet to facilitate an R&D-like process in the service of a social good—in this case, local food—is exciting, and promising enough to warrant support.
Dear Friends,
We’re making a big leap and I need your help.
Before he died, my passionately environmental engineer/inventor grandpa talked to me about a challenge our generation would face: the complex systems his generation had set up turned out not to be as healthy for ourselves or the rest of the natural world and too few people comprehend or are involved in the decisions that operate them.
I started The Windowfarms Project as a grassroots way to start to address a nexus in these issues– our food system– and to give ordinary people a way of participating in the “green revolution.” Over the last year, through an organized online collaboration of regular folks, we “windowfarmers” have designed a system for growing nutritious veggies in the windows of homes in a way that looks like an elegant garden/fountain. We have given away the plans and shown anyone how to make them out of cheap, easily accessible and recycled materials. Us windowfarmers are ongoingly testing new techniques and sharing results online to make windowfarms continually more efficient, more productive, more nutritious, quieter, prettier, and more tasty.
